1 January 2015

2 January

First I saw this photo in my RSS reader and I thought — see, that’s the way to do it, just hide an activity tracker inside a leather strap and get stupid bloggers to quote your press release which inappropriately calls it a smartwatch. Then I opened the article, saw the flip side and oh god the humanity why.

I’d really like for a future version of iOS to implement a level of push notifications that don’t disappear from the lock screen until they’ve been acted on — reappearing after you unlock and lock again. I wouldn’t mind if they’re reserved for Apple’s own apps, such as Reminders, to prevent abuse. Remind me until I’ve actually done it.

‘The absence of any noticeable life [in the universe] may be an argument in favour of us being in a simulation,’ he told me. […] Musk flipped through a few more possibilities, each packing a deeper existential chill than the last, until finally he came around to the import of it all. ‘If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way,’ he said. ‘And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.’

Judging from other recent quotes from Musk, he must be thinking that an easy explanation for the disappearance of all those other civilizations is that they invented artificial intelligence and it wiped them out. But then you still have to find a reason why those AIs wouldn’t be visible in the sky (and why they haven’t wiped us out yet). What if, instead, what happens to all intelligent civilizations is that they invent virtual reality, and become shut-ins just as they were about to start colonizing space?

For the record, I had been wondering for a while why Oculus doesn’t embed cameras in the headset to track your movements. Everyone says HoloLens’ motion is incredibly smooth, so evidently it does work.